


The Avengers vs. Ikea

by camwolfe



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Fluff, Gen, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-16
Updated: 2014-11-16
Packaged: 2018-02-25 16:18:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2628119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/camwolfe/pseuds/camwolfe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Apparently it takes the entire Avengers team to build a set of Ikea furniture.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Avengers vs. Ikea

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [复仇者VS宜家](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2666165) by [joankindom](https://archiveofourown.org/users/joankindom/pseuds/joankindom)



> Here's the proof that I can, actually, write something that doesn't involve angst.

It quickly became apparent that Steve’s apartment was not going to be big enough for the two of them.

The one-bedroom apartment was perfectly fine when it was just Steve, but Bucky took up a fair amount of space. It also didn’t help that Sam crashed at Steve’s place whenever he came to visit.

Pepper helped Steve find a new apartment, with three bedrooms and a spacious layout. She assured him that it was in a nice neighbourhood and had good resale value, not that Steve particularly cared about that. The problem was that this place did not come furnished, unlike his old one. That meant it was up to him to buy furniture for every single room.

Ikea turned out to be a god-send. Steve dragged Bucky there one afternoon, calmly ignoring his complaints. Bucky only agreed to go because apparently there was some kind of restaurant in it, and he was not one to turn down food.

It was a little overwhelming initially. It was unlike any store Steve had ever been in, and felt more like an elaborate trap than a place to buy furniture.

“Why is there a map?” Bucky asked as they started walking. He looked a little desperate. “It’s a goddamn store. We don’t need a map.”

“I’m taking a map,” Steve said as he grabbed one. “Better safe than sorry.”

Bucky rolled his eyes at him. Sure enough, the map didn’t turn out to be any help when Steve got desperately lost in the kitchen section. He ended up wandering aimlessly until he found Bucky sitting comfortably on a sofa.

“Where did you go?” Steve asked, frowning down at him.

Bucky shrugged. He actually looked quite comfortable on that sofa. “I got bored. Let’s just buy a few rooms and get out of here.”

Steve stared. “Buy a few rooms?”

Bucky pointed to a sign on the wall of the tastefully decorated living room he was sitting in. “Look. You can just buy a whole room at once. You don’t even have to decorate it. It even comes with the picture frames.”

Steve looked at him for a moment longer and then went off to find a sales person.

 

The new furniture got delivered a few days later. The delivery men gave each other a tragic look when they saw how many flights of stairs they had to carry the boxes up. Steve immediately helped them unload all of it from the truck, and then tipped them generously. He and Bucky then spent the afternoon carrying the boxes and sofas up the stairs.

“It’s their job to carry this shit, Steve,” Bucky said as he carried three more flat packed boxes into the apartment. “They get paid to do it.”

“This stuff is heavy,” Steve said calmly as he pushed a sofa through the doorway. “What if they hurt their backs or something trying to get it all up the stairs?”

Bucky glared at him, but Steve had long since learned to differentiate between Bucky’s actual-anger glares and Bucky’s I-Am-Tired-Of-Your-Shit-Steve glares. “What if I hurt my back?”

“Fine, then don’t help with the rest of it,” Steve said as he finished moving the couch. “I’ll just carry up the other thirty boxes by myself.”

Sure enough, Steve only made it down one flight of stairs before he heard Bucky groan and jog to catch up with him.

 

Once they got all the boxes inside, they decided to start with the living room first.

“Don’t you want a bed to sleep in tonight?” Steve asked as he opened one of the coffee table boxes.

Bucky shrugged as he opened another box. “The mattress is in there. That’s fine.”

“All right then,” Steve said as he finally got everything out of the box. “What the hell?”

“Jesus,” Bucky muttered as he held up various packets of small items.

“I mean, I know this all said assembly required…” Steve said slowly. “But this is ridiculous.”

“Is this the coffee table or the bookshelf?” Bucky asked, holding up various pieces of wood.

“I have no idea.”

“It comes with instructions, right?”

“I’m sure we can figure it out,” Steve said.

“No fucking way,” Bucky said. He started opening the packets filled with small screws. “Find the instructions. Don’t you have that event tonight?”

“Yeah, but – “

“Then you can’t spend the whole afternoon trying to figure out how to put this all together.”

“Ugh,” Steve muttered, but he finally found the page of instructions. “It’s not in English.”

“There’ll be an English version.”

Steve turned the pages over, but he still couldn’t find the English version. Bucky sighed and reached over. He grabbed the booklet from Steve and flipped through it until he found a language he could read.

“Okay,” he said slowly, squinting at the diagram. “This looks simple. Wait, I think you’re supposed to use the tool that came with it.”

“This thing?” Steve asked, holding up a small metal rod with a bend in it.

Bucky stared at it. “That’s all we’re supposed to use for all of this?”

“I guess,” Steve said. He started on the coffee table.

They ended up having to open a few new boxes to get another little metal tool thing, because Bucky crushed his in frustration.

“I can think of seventy different ways to kill someone with this,” Bucky said slowly, looking at a second piece of mangled piece of metal in his hand. “And I apparently can’t use it to put a fucking coffee table together.”

Steve was concentrating carefully on making sure the leg on his table didn’t wobble. “There’s another one in the bookshelf box.”

Twenty minutes later, they had two coffee tables built.

Steve stared at Bucky’s table. “Why does yours look different?”

Bucky looked over at Steve’s and laughed. “Yours is upside down. You built it upside down.”

Steve lifted his table up and stared at in horror. “Oh my god.”

Bucky just laughed harder. “Jesus, you’re even worse at this than me. Give it here.”

Steve pushed his table over to Bucky just as someone knocked on their door. Bucky got to work fixing Steve’s mistake while Steve went to answer it.

Clint was standing on the other side of the door.

“What happened to your face?” Steve asked immediately. Clint’s face was covered in bruises, and it looked like he was on his way to having quite the black eye.

“Long story,” Clint said. “Anyway, I just came by to make sure you’re going to Tony’s event tonight.”

“Yeah,” Steve said. “Why?”

Clint shrugged. “Because I don’t think Nat’s going, and that means I’m not going unless you’re going.”

Steve stared at him. “Uh, why?”

“Because then I have to hang out with Tony all night.”

Steve shrugged. “Fair enough. Do you know anything about Ikea furniture?”

“No,” Clint said. Steve heard the familiar shriek of metal as Bucky clenched his hand and crushed yet another metal tool. “But Tony is trying to make me come early so Pepper can make sure my outfit is fine. Please, please let me help build your rickety Swedish furniture.”

Steve let him in, and Clint took over for Bucky. Bucky apparently decided that enough was enough and went to work on the bookshelf instead.

They were running low on metal tool things, but when Steve looked over, Clint was attaching the legs of a chair to the base using an arrow as a tool.

“Where did you get that?” Steve asked.

Clint shrugged. “You never know when you might need one.”

Steve shook his head. “You definitely didn’t have that with you when you walked in here.”

Clint grinned at him and waved the arrow in the air. “I never travel unprepared.”

Unfortunately, Bucky happened to walk by just as Clint waved the arrow around. Clint nearly hit him in the face, and Bucky pulled the leg off the chair that Clint was building in retaliation.

Steve leaned his head against his upside-down coffee table and sighed.

 

Thor showed up next. Apparently he dropped by for no other reason than he hadn’t seen Steve in a while and he missed him.

“Do you need help assembling the…” Thor asked cheerfully as he easily picked up one of the large boxes. “Borgsjö"?

Steve, Bucky, and Clint stared at him.

“The what?” Clint asked.

“The Borgsjö,” Thor said. “I believe this is a type of shelf on which to store books?”

Steve and Bucky looked at each other. Bucky shrugged.

“Sure, Thor,” Steve said. “We’d really appreciate the help.”

 

The four of them were all sitting on the floor when Tony walked in.

“Good morning,” Tony said, staring at the phone in his hand. “Or afternoon, I guess, by now.”

“Why do you have a key to my apartment?” Steve asked.

Tony shrugged. “For emergencies?”

Steve looked at Bucky.

“We’re changing the locks tomorrow,” Bucky said.

“Yep,” Steve agreed.

Tony looked offended. “I promise to only use it in actual emergencies!”

Steve sighed and put down the shelf he was holding. “What’s the emergency right now, then?”

Tony paused and looked up from his phone. “Uh… this mess you call a living room. Jesus, why don’t you just hire someone to do this?”

“Not all of us are billionaires, Tony,” Steve said. “Some of us have to build our own furniture.”

“Ugh,” Tony said. “This all looks flimsy anyway.”

“It is actually quite sturdy,” Thor said. “It can even hold my weight.”

Despite Steve and Bucky’s protests, Thor stepped up onto the recently completed coffee table. To everyone’s surprise, the table didn’t break and Thor stayed triumphantly on top of it.

“Huh,” Tony said. “That’s actually… that’s actually quite impressive.”

Tony knelt down next to the coffee table and ran his hands over the joints. “Who made this?”

“I did,” Clint said from behind the bookshelf that he and Bucky were working on.

Tony rolled his eyes. “No, I mean who designed it.”

“Someone at Ikea,” Steve said. He tossed Tony the booklet with all the information in it. Tony made no move to catch it, and it landed on the floor next to him. Only then did Tony pick it up and start flipping through it.

Steve rolled his eyes.

“Hold on, I’ll be right back,” Tony said. He stared at the booklet and then back at his phone, quickly typing things in. He put the phone to his ear and walked into the kitchen.

“Is he actually trying to contact whoever designed this furniture?” Steve asked.

“Probably,” Clint said. “Watch, they’ll probably have a job with Stark Industries by tomorrow morning.”

 

Bruce showed up a few minutes later. Apparently Tony had left him in the car, saying he’d be back in a minute.

“He’s on the phone in the kitchen,” Steve told Bruce while he hovered in the doorway.

“He’s giving an Ikea furniture designer a job,” Clint said.

“Okay,” Bruce said calmly. “Do you know how long he’ll be?”

“No idea,” Steve said. “You’re welcome to stay until he does, though.”

“Oh, no thank you, Steve,” Bruce said. He eyed the mess of furniture apprehensively. “This isn’t really… this is a frustrating task, and frustrating really isn’t that great of an emotion for me. What if… what if I went and got pizza instead?”

“Yes!” Clint shouted from behind the bookshelf and promptly dropped the shelf that he was supposed to be holding. Bucky glared at him.

“Okay,” Bruce said, smiling. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

“There’s a great place just down the street,” Steve called after him.

 

By the time Natasha came by, the furniture was only half assembled. Steve, Bucky, Clint, Thor, and Bruce were sitting on the couches, their feet propped up on their brand new coffee tables. The end tables were covered in pizza boxes.

“Well,” Natasha said from the doorway. “I can see that you tried.”

“We did a great job!” Clint protested. “Look at all of this. Look at all of this progress.”

“And,” Natasha said, walking over to the remaining piles of boxes. “Look at all of this.”

“That stuff is too complicated,” Clint said.

Natasha raised her eyebrows. “You’re telling me that building a footstool is too complicated for all five of you?”

“Yes,” they all said at once.

Natasha sighed and started opening one of the boxes.

 

Pepper arrived to find all seven of them comfortably seated on the new couches.

“All of you need to be at the fundraiser in less than two hours!” Pepper said as she walked through the door, her voice becoming more shrill with each word.

“It’s fine, it’s fine, we’ll be there,” Tony said from the armchair. “Come try out the new furniture.”

“Is this Ikea?” Pepper asked, looking around the room now filled with tasteful and conveniently designed furniture.

“Yes,” Steve said. “And there’s pizza on the counter if you want some. We just figured out how to plug the tv in, and we’ve got Netflix going.”

“You mean _I_ figured it out,” Natasha said.

“Hey, I was the one who got the Netflix working,” Tony countered.

Pepper looked like she wanted to protest, but the pizza smelled very good and the furniture was very comfortable. Steve, Clint, and Thor made room for her on the couch.

 

They were only an hour late to the fundraiser, and Steve had to admit that it was pretty nice to come home to a furnished apartment.

**Author's Note:**

> But seriously, what IS that little metal tool thing called? 
> 
> As always, you can find me at cameronwolfe.tumblr.com!


End file.
